I can appreciate your frustration; it can be difficult to get the hang of a new community--especially if you're not completely versed in its area of focus and/or familiar with its culture.

Perhaps you may wish to step back a bit and follow some of the threads for a few days. That should give you an idea of the type of information people are looking for and responding to. Furthermore, you may wish to check out Best Nodes and Worst Nodes to see what works here and what doesn't (respectively).

In addition, I highly recommend taking a peek at turnstep's home node, which collects a number of useful links to various nodes and updates a few of the FAQ's that are getting a bit long in the tooth. That'll give you a very good base for understanding the community at large.

Simply put, it's going to take time for you to overcome the initial resistance you've encountered. Don't worry about it; just focus on learning Perl. Work on some, get stuck, use Search and Super Search to see if the answers are already online, and (if not or you're still stuck) then post.

You may wish to wait a while before trying to help teach Perl. Make sure you have a firm understanding about the language, as well as the resources available for learning it. It's great that you want to help people learn it; to do that, you need to know it first. (This is not a place for "those who can't, teach.")

Learn what's here and what's not. When you find things that aren't, then write up Tutorials, Meditations, or what have you. PM is a pretty open community, provided you play nice. You've (inadvertantly, I'm sure) gotten off on the wrong foot. Don't sweat that...just start participating professionally.

When you do that, the points will (eventually) come.

--f